In his book The Heroin Diaries, the former Motley Crue bassist wrote of the moment in December 1987 when he turned blue and couldn’t be woken after taking an overdose. He required a shot of adrenaline injected directly into his heart and admitted he was closer to death at that moment than he’d been at any other time.

Speaking on his radio show Sixx Sense (you can listen to the audio below), he said: “My darkest moment was not the moment a lot of people talk about, which was my near-fatal overdose. Or the one after that, when I woke up with a needle in my arm. It was about halfway through that year when I knew I couldn’t get out.

“I was stuck. Have you ever been physically stuck somewhere? It’s exactly like that. I was going through the beginning stages of withdrawal because the dealer’s dealer had been busted. The supply was gone. I was a day and a half without any heroin and I was really in a lot of pain.”

Finally his dealer made contact to say that he’d scored a supply, and came over to hook Sixx up. “ I’ll never forget. He was fixing up the rig and he said, ‘You’re in hell, and in about eight seconds you’re going to be in heaven.’ That’s what that drug can do. If I’d just rode it out another week I could have broken the cycle. I didn’t know that. But why would he tell me that? He was my drug dealer.”

Sixx said he was recalling the experience in order to demonstrate that there are indeed ways out of addiction, and that information can be found more easily now than in the past. “I didn’t have a lot of information – I got my information from drug dealers, prostitutes, strippers and the alternative underworld. There wasn’t like, ‘Hey Nikki, here’s a link.’ There was no link.”

“You can find phone numbers. If I had those phone numbers I don’t know if I would have gone as long in my addiction. That’s my hope for doing this show. People can get information and hopefully use it,” he added.

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